Job 19-21

(October 14, 2014)

                Job is very quickly becoming my favorite book of scripture.  In these chapters, I was impressed by the language describing the temporal blessings of the wicked – because they aptly described where I was only a year ago.  Some of the language seemed to precisely describe things that I was thinking.  I thought myself having “arrived,” that I now had moved into a huge and wonderful house, and was ready to just enjoy and maintain what I had gathered and to ‘eat’ of the fruit of my labor.

                In this moment, when I was preparing to eat, the Lord snatched the food out of my mouth, so to speak.  I now find myself in a much different position than I was in last year.  By objective measures, you would think that it was worse in every way – no big house, no family, no possessions.  But I am growing ever-closer to the Lord, and I have felt and am feeling His influence in my life in a manner that exceeds any other time (including my mission).

                I have become very grateful over the past short while for the calamity that has happened.  I was on the road to destruction, and the Lord in snatching the ‘food’ from my mouth also snatched me from the mouth of Hell.  I am still amazed at what He did for me – I surely didn’t deserve to be saved from the destruction that I so rightly had brought upon myself.  And yet here I am, blessed beyond anything I could have imagined.  Perhaps not temporally right now (and perhaps never temporally), but spiritually.